In wireless network, every time user equipment (UE) is going to transmit data, it needs to request the base station to distribute certain wireless resource. Due to the limited wireless resource in wireless network, base station has to schedule the wireless resource in accordance with the actual requirements of the UEs, distribute the corresponding wireless resource for every UE in order to get the wireless resource used efficiently.
In HSUPA (High Speed Uplink Packet Access), E-DCH (Enhanced Dedicated Channel) will support multi-rate multi-service, which have different QoS (Quality of Service) requirements. Therefore, after getting the resource authorization from the base station, UE should select a proper transport format combination according to the actual requirement of various services or MAC-d flows. Both base station and the UE comprise a TFCS (Transport Format Combination Set), which includes a large number of Transport Format Combinations ( TFCs ). Both Node B controlled scheduling and UE TFC selection are achieved by operating TFCS. Wherein, TFCS is generated by RNC (Radio Network Controller) and transmitted to UE and Node B via RRC (Radio Resource Controller).
In prior art, generally, the same pointer will be used in Node B scheduling and UE TFC selection. That restricts the efficiency of the two processes. TFCI is used in UE TFC selection for indicating the transport format combination (TFC) in data transport. However, it is the available power RoT (Rise over Thermal) in the current cell to be scheduled by Node B. Thus, the efficiency of using the UE pointer that directly relates to TFCI for implementing the fast TFCS controlling in Node B scheduling process is low, especially when the TFCS list is large.
Node B scheduling process and TFC selection process are not differentiated when operating TFCS in prior art. However, the dynamic parts (e.g. the size and quantity of MAC-d PDU (Protocol Data Unit)) of TFCS are flexible, on the contrary, the selectable physics formats in physical layer are very limited, therefore, the Node scheduling process and data transmitting process should be considered separately to improve the efficiency of Node B scheduling.
It is disclosed that the single pointer solution using step-wise signal transmission in Reference [1] (“Feasibility study for enhancement uplink for UTRA FDD”, 3GPP TR25.896, v2.0.0.). And, it's disclosed the single pointer solution using multi-step signal transmission in Reference [6] (R1-04-0912, “Multi-step signalling and synchronization scheme”, Alcatel Shanghai Bell). In these traditional Node B scheduling solutions, only one pointer (User Pointer) is used. Said user pointer is used for limiting the “transport format combination subsets controlled by Node B” of UE in Node B scheduling and selecting the proper TFCI in UE TFC selection algorithm, said proper TFCI will be transmitted to Node B by UE in data transmission. Because neither the foresaid step-wise solution nor the multi-step solution differentiates the Node B scheduling process and UE TFC selection process, the aforesaid solutions can not have both the advantages of the two processes simultaneously.
It is disclosed that the multi-pointer solution according to the MAC-d (Medium Access Control-d) flows in Reference [3] (R2-0401294, “Per-Cell, Per-UE, Per-MAC-d Flow basis Scheduling Signaling in Enhanced Uplink”, NEC). Wherein, it is suggested that using multiple pointers, each of which points to each sub-TFC of each MAC-d flow, put differently, the number of pointers will increase linearly with the number of MAC-d flows increasing. E-DCH in HSUPA supports multi-rate multi-service, thus, the number of MAC-d flows may be so large that there will be more pointers accordingly. It brings the complexity into Node B scheduling for processing multiple pointers individually and high L1 signaling overhead since all the pointers need to be sent to UE from Node B. Thus, UE will be very sensitive to the error of L1 signaling transmission. It is preferred that Node B distributes available interference headroom to UE so the QoS information can be weighted and then be reported to Node B for scheduling purpose. Detailed QoS information can be considered in the UE TFC selection. Otherwise, all of the QoS information for each service must be transmitted to Node B by RNC or UE. An additional computation is also required to get TFCI from multiple sub-TFCIs for data transmission.
The technical solutions disclosed in Reference [2] (3GPP TR25.808 v0.0.3) and Reference [5] (R1-0400049, “E-DCH link performance—BPSK vs. 8PSK”, Qualcomm Europe) show that HSUPA has a highly restricted physical transmission rate but has abundant services, any solution not differentiating the TFCS processing functions for Node B scheduling purpose and the processing functions for data format transmission purpose will reduce the scheduling efficiency of Node B.